Workers find message hidden in Auschwitz wall

Tue Apr 28 05:11:00 EST 2009

Workers demolishing the wall of a building that once belonged to the former Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp have found a message in a bottle written by prisoners 65 years ago, Auschwitz museum officials said.

"We know two of the Auschwitz prisoners who signed the message survived the camp, but their later fate isn't known," Auschwitz-Birkenau museum historian Jerzy Mensfelt told AFP in a telephone interview.

"If they are alive, they would be in their 80s now. Perhaps the publicity surrounding this discovery will lead to more information," he said.

Workers found the bottled message when recently demolishing a wall at the State Higher Vocational School in the southern Polish town of Oswiecim, the site of the infamous World War II Auschwitz Nazi German death camp.

The bottle with a note inside had been placed in the mortar of a wall of building which had served as a warehouse for the camp's Nazi guards during the war.

Hand-written in pencil, the note bears the names and camp ID numbers of seven camp prisoners including four Poles and one Frenchman from Lyon, Mr Mensfelt confirmed. All were aged 18 to 20.

Further details are expected to be made public in the coming days, he said.

More than 1 million people, mostly European Jews, perished at the Auschwitz-Birkenau twin death camps during World War Two.

Nazi Germany established Auschwitz as part of Adolf Hitler's systematic genocide against European Jews. In total, 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust.

Others who died there as well included tens of thousands of non-Jewish Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, Romas (gypsies) and anti-Nazi resistance fighters from across Europe.